


Dark Confining Pain (the hardest to forgive)

by wyrmy



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, Angst with an unhappy ending, Character Death, Character Study, Gen, I try not to put upsetting content in tags, Not Really Character Death, Wordcount: 100-1.000, as usual, but im sure you can imagine, lets just say that boomer isnt a charcter per se in this but she is there, poor old bill not being very mentally well, set at the begining of season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:20:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29651922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wyrmy/pseuds/wyrmy
Summary: Bill Adama is not feeling very well in the aftermath of being shot. He directs some of this towards someone who really isn't in a position to do anything about it.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Dark Confining Pain (the hardest to forgive)

**Author's Note:**

> Basically this is just a character study about the fact that Bill was apparently hanging out in the morgue and agonizing at Boomer's dead body. There are descriptions of what the body looks like (not in much detail) and some descriptions (again not graphic) of the experience of being shot.

He had to go to the morgue again.

He didn’t know why he needed to- just like Saul didn’t know why he needed a drink, like Kara didn’t know why she needed to pick fights every two minutes, like Lee didn’t know why he needed to rebel. Like they didn’t know why they had to betray him betray him betray him.

Like Boomer hadn’t, allegedly, understood why she shot him in the chest.

Bill needed to go and he knew if he went some of the poison would leech out of him and he’d be able to think again. For a few hours at least.

But why?

His chest itched under his jacket so he went where he needed to go before he scratched himself to pieces.

Bill stood there, in the cold of the morgue, and looked down at that beautiful, grey face. A young woman that would never grow old, like had he grown old. Like he had been left to.

Except, of course, that she was a toaster. Less human than the ship that carried them both, less alive, less compassionate. 

He’d fought Cylons before, in the previous War, and he’d always thought of them as horrible, implacable automatons: evil, no buts about it. You shot them and then they stopped shooting at you. Gods, he’d had it easy back then.

But this dead body lying on the slab had a double-exposure to it. The monster and the girl. The enemy that you cut down without remorse and the young officer whose shining future you wept for.

And if that shithead Leoben was to be believed, she wasn’t dead at all, but somewhere else, alive and well and probably gloating about shooting the old man and getting away with it.

Bill was smart. He flattered himself that his good grades in school, his decent record, the various correct calls he’d made over the years counted for something in that department, but yet looking down at this body he didn’t know whether to kiss it on the forehead or spit with rage.

Indecision is lethal in a military commander, and Bill had a long way to go before he could afford to crack.

He was getting twitchy, he was showing the signs, and it scared him. Only this morning the young marine who brought his coffee had startled him. He’d seen a dark, slim figure with an outstretched hand and had practically jumped out of his skin.

Last time, he hadn’t been ready. The sight of Boomer raising a weapon against him had been so unexpected that his brain had simply refused to process it.

He was ready now. Frak, was he ready. Too ready.

And here was Boomer, young Sharon Valerii, whose silly affair with the Chief he had let slide out of sentimentality- bad call- whose recent suicide attempt had made him so worried about her…

He’d been so frakking smug when she came back from that mission. Like a military commander can ever really heal his people just by giving them a chance to succeed or whatever asinine thing he thought he’d done for her, so frakkin smug up right up until the part where he’d felt the impact of the first bullet.

Against all odds he’d lived, his old heart had resisted the temptation to give out, and now he was stuck in the ugliest situation of his life- and he’d gotten divorced while his sons were still young.

Now was not the time to start jumping at every noise and half-seen movement in the corner of his eye. Lee had betrayed him, Kara had abandoned him, Roslin had taken a third of his fleet and his two surviving children and frakked off to Kobol of all Godsforsaken places, and Saul had just shown that he was emphatically and totally unfit to command. 

Which was a Godsdamned bitch of an unsatisfactory situation.

It was getting so that he didn’t like to shower, or even take off his shirt because it meant seeing the scar and remembering all at once how afraid he’d been, in between being stupidly clueless and being passed out helpless.

So help him, Bill Adama never wanted to feel that way again if he lived two thousand years.

Bill always told himself that regret and guilt were pointless, and that you simply have to make your decisions and live with them, and through he didn’t fully believe it, he knew he should. Whenever something awful happened, he tried to tell himself that he’d made the best choice he could at the time, rolled the hard six, whatever, and he tried to move on.

But this current predicament wasn’t about his own decisions. 

Why had Roslin chosen to turn Starbuck against him?

Why had Kara, who he loved like a daughter, stolen from him, run away from him, betrayed him?

Why had Lee turned his back on everything Bill had tried to teach him about military discipline and chain of command and sided with mutiny-fomenting Roslin over him?

Why had Boomer shot him?

He realized that he was bent over her corpse, stooped over to peer at her closed eyes, asking her “why?” over and over again.

His face was wet.

He wiped it off and put Sharon away, zippered her into her body bag (how hard it was not think of tucking a child in at bedtime), closed the drawer and went back to his job.

The scar on his chest wasn’t itching anymore. He had a species to guard and lead, and that was going to be his job for the rest of his life. He had no room for error, no space for complacency. 

He’d be back.

**Author's Note:**

> i called Leoben a shithead for no reason other than i hate him. similar (lack) of reasoning behind the Brokeback Mountain reference.  
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
